Best Practices for Exchange Shared Mailboxes

A shared mailbox is a mailbox in Exchange Online or Office 365 that multiple users can access, read or send emails simultaneously. This facilitates collaboration and improves efficiency among users through a common mailbox and calendar, allowing them to schedule and view calendar events.

Shared mailboxes are generally created in an organization for common email accounts with generic email addresses, such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc., where customers and employees from different departments can communicate with the support team and company staff.

Shared mailboxes make it easier for a company to monitor emails by allowing a group of people to monitor, manage, and send emails from such common email accounts in an agile and organized manner.

In this article, you will learn the best practices to manage and administer Exchange Shared Mailboxes in Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange in a Hybrid environment.

Best Practices for Exchange Shared Mailboxes

As an administrator, you can incorporate the following best practices to manage shared mailboxes in your organization efficiently.

Determine and Limit Access

After creating a shared mailbox, you need to decide which users can access the mailbox with all or limited access and features. Defining permissions for each user is critical to keep things well-organized and secure your sensitive and confidential business information.

You can manage the mailbox permissions to grant either Full Access to the added member or restrict them to Read and manage, Send as, or Send on behalf of permission that allows members to send email on behalf of their account name and shared mailbox name. ?

Save Replies in Shared Mailbox

By default, the emails sent via a shared mailbox or reply to a message received in the shared mailbox are saved in the user's Sent Items folder. One of the best practices is to keep a copy of messages or emails sent via shared mailbox within share mailbox. To do this, follow these steps:

• Login to Microsoft or Office 365 admin portal and click Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes.

• Then click on your Shared mailbox.

• Click on the Edit button below Sent items.

• Enable the Copy items sent as this mailbox and Copy items sent on behalf of this mailbox options and click 'Save.'

Once enabled, emails sent by any user on behalf of the shared mailbox are also saved within the mailbox. This will help others check if the messages are sent and queries are resolved, preventing duplicate responses or messages.

Use Email Templates

Create email templates for your shared mailboxes and ask members to use them while replying to the messages. This will help reduce the response time as users won't need to draft an email for every response. Besides, this will also standardize the response and make you look more professional with replies as all members in your team will be using the same email templates.

Email templates with canned responses also come in handy when you receive multiple queries or messages related to the same product, service, or feature that your organization provides or a common issue that your users often encounter. Again, this will help your team save time and respond immediately to the users' queries.

Manage Mailbox Storage Limit

Microsoft 365 or Office 365 provides a 50 GB free shared mailbox limit by default. Although this may seem enough, a shared mailbox may quickly fill up and consume this limit. When the mailbox reaches its limit, you may receive new emails for a while, but you can't send new messages. The messages will eventually stop coming and senders (customers) will receive non-delivery receipts.

However, you can increase the limit and store more mails in Exchange online by assigning a license to the shared mailbox.

While there's no limit on the number of members you can add to a shared mailbox, you should keep limited members per shared mailbox to avoid connection issues.?

Strengthen Shared Mailbox Security

Shared mailboxes are accessible by all the members with either full access or read permissions. If an attacker gets the member's user credentials via social engineering or phishing attack, they can access and steal your sensitive and confidential business information that can put your organization at risk.

Thus, it's critical to ensure users change their password after a specific period and use a complex password for signing in to their user accounts. You must set up a password policy and regularly educate/train your employees to,

• Identify phishing or spam emails as sometimes malicious emails may bypass the spam filters.?
• Ask them not to open attachments or links from unknown sender directly from the email client.
• Never write a password anywhere or share it with anyone.
• Never access or log in to their account while connected to a public Wi-Fi or unsecured network.

Besides, delete the user account or change the user password when an employee leaves the organization. The ex-employee may access your valuable business information and misuse it if you forget.

Did you know: Emails sent via shared mailboxes are not encrypted.

Audit Shared Mailboxes

Auditing shared mailbox and members is also critical to keep everyone on the same page and ensure all team members know how to use the shared mailbox. It should be well-defined how emails will be assigned and replied to.

Further discussing problems related to the mailbox and keeping a regular check on the incoming and outgoing messages will help the team resolve common issues and improve collaboration to manage emails more efficiently.

To Wrap Up

Shared mailboxes are a great way to increase cooperation among employees in your company and improve efficiency. They are necessary for any organization to manage the increasing email workload, define ownerships, improve tracking, and prevent duplicate replies expeditiously.

Shared mailboxes also help reduce the response time as several users have access to the mailbox, which increases the chances of someone available and readily responding to the requests and queries. The best practices we discussed in this article apply to Exchange Online and Exchange Hybrid. If you are using on-premises Exchange with Office 365 in Hybrid setup and need help in moving mailboxes or public folders from your on-premises Exchange Server to Office 365, you can take help of a software, such as Stellar Converter for EDB. The software can directly export the user mailboxes and public folders from the Exchange database to Exchange Online or Office 365.